Thursday, June 18, 2015

The Azanians: A Cushitic speaking people




I normally don't make these kinds of quick "Copy & Paste" types of posts but in this case I think the material I'm trying to touch upon is pretty self-explanatory & doesn't require me to hunch over and scrounge through various forms of data or information to share and research for your reading pleasure so consider this a mere recommend/ interesting share that I recently encountered.


"The Azanians of the 1st to 4th century A.D.were no doubt Cushitic speakers, and their descendants and related immigrants from the north brought with them their traditions and funerary customs,some of which were passed on to the peoples living in Kenya at the time."
[1]

If you're at all interested in learning more about the Azanians you can consult documents like the Periplus of the Erytraean Sea [2] among others of the time (I'm honestly no expert on the Azanians and only have a face-value knowledge of them); authors from antiquity who referred to Azania and Azanians are referred to rather accurately in the Azania Wikipedia page. They seem to have been Southeast Africans (Kenya down to Tanzania).

If I had any extra comments; I wonder why these Azanians were named distinctly from the pastoralist Barbaroi tribes to their north. From Northeastern Sudan down to Northeastern Somalia; the inhabitants were conflated together often under the label of "Barbaroi" by the Greco-Romans and even in some cases the Aksumites

As fellow Cushitic speakers one could expect these Azanians to perhaps have been culturally similar enough to their north lying neighbors to maybe be conflated with them yet the Greco-Romans, South Arabians and such they traded with saw fit to give them a distinct label. It's interesting, that's all I can say.

If anyone would like to share any extra information on the Azanians; go ahead in the comment section. Anyway, this was in all candor meant to simply be a quick share sort of post, so enjoy the information.

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I actually upload lengthy recordings of various Cushitic languages onto Youtube, those of you interested in hearing what various Cushitic languages sound like can go ahead and listen to them.

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